For nine years, Harmanpreet Kaur’s career as captain of the Indian women’s cricket team teetered on the brink of near-misses and lingering deliberations. The biggest question centred on an elusive maiden World Cup title and India’s failure to cross the final hurdle at major tournaments. Their breakout run at the one-day international (ODI) World Cup ended in heartbreak in 2017, a year after Kaur was appointed captain in the Twenty20 format and earmarked to take over the reins across all formats of the game.
Under her leadership, India qualified for but lost their first T20 World Cup final in 2020 and ended with a silver medal at the Commonwealth Games in 2022, before suffering another agonising T20 World Cup semifinal defeat in 2023. In November 2025, the what-if was finally buried. Kaur’s India beat then-defending champions Australia in a sensational come-from-behind World Cup semifinal before overcoming a resolute South Africa in the final to be crowned world champions for the first time – in front of adoring home fans.
Less than a year later, on October 6, 2026, Kaur stepped down as India’s all-format captain, ending a decade-long leadership journey that saw India transform into world champions after decades spent chasing cricket’s traditional heavyweights Australia and England. Decisions that were not always understood, not always easy, and sometimes came at a personal cost.” The announcement was made after discussions on the future of Indian women’s cricket, which took place a day earlier between Kaur, Smriti Mandhana, head coach Amol Muzumdar and Devajit Saikia, honorary secretary of the Indian cricket board. Mandhana, who was Kaur’s deputy for four years, replaced her as captain.
Kaur, India’s most capped women’s cricketer, enjoyed a leadership stint that included five Test matches, 51 ODIs and 155 T20Is, with win percentages of 80, 58.82 and 59.35 respectively. The Punjab-born top-order batter’s last game in charge was the recently concluded Asian Games in Japan, where India stepped on the podium as gold medallists. Nine days earlier, Kaur led them to an Asia Cup trophy in the United Arab Emirates.
The medals and trophies tell one part of Kaur’s tale as captain. The other lies in how India learned to play differently under her. Kaur took over as India’s full-time T20I captain in 2016, after the team’s disappointing group-stage exit at a home T20 World Cup.
It followed a match-winning innings that helped India win their first T20I series against Australia in any format, and a few months later, she was signed as the first Indian cricketer in the Big Bash League, Australia’s franchise T20 cricket competition It did not take long for Kaur, the batter, to announce her intentions. Facing the mighty Australia in the semifinal of the ODI World Cup in 2017, Kaur played an unbeaten innings of 171 that took India into the final and challenged long-held assumptions about the power and aggression an Indian batter could bring to the women’s game. Following the World Cup runners-up finish, which is widely regarded as a defining moment in Indian women’s cricket, the top-order batter recalled how her father’s friends would discourage her from playing big shots, saying, “Why do you need to attempt big hits when you know girls do not have power to clear the rope?” “After watching [the 2017] World Cup, they started believing maybe my teammates and I can clear the rope,” she said in an interview with The Cricket Monthly magazine.
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